AS SICK AS OUR SECRET SERVICES

MI5 Killers Sabotaged Chinook Helicopter That Crashed at Mull of Kintyre in 1994 Finally Exposed?

by Trowbridge H. Ford

The fog has never really cleared since an RAF Chinook helicopter crashed through it on the Hill of Stone at the Mull of Kintyre on June 2, 1994, killing all 25 intelligence agents and the crew of four on board while on its way to Fort George in Scotland to attend an annual conference on counterterrorism. While the incident is of more recent vintage than Bloody Sunday when British soldiers, epecially of the Parachute Regiment, cut down forteen civilians after shots were fired by unknown parties, the helicopter crash caused 29 victims. In addition, the Army massacre occurred in an area where plans had long been made for meeting some such incident, the crash came as a complete surprise. Ultimately, both incidents were the subject of several inquiries which resulted in quite changing explanations of the tragedies. The only sure thing is that Bloody Sunday helped usher in direct rule from London while the helicopter crash helped usher it out.

During 1971, the Official and Provisional Irish Republican Armies had established "no-go" areas in Derry, much unlike the situation in Belfast, and much to the British Army's disgust. London's introduction of internment without trial earlier had been in the hope of seperatiing the troublemakers from the general Catholic population in the expectation of re-establishing some kind of stability but it wasn's working in Derry.To deal with the problem, London adopted the plan of Commander Land Forces, Major General Robert Ford, of carrying out a search and control operation for the gunmen while clearing away the barricades.(1)

In explaining the policy, Ford and lower commanders made it increasingly possible that protesters might be aimed at, and shot in any confrontation over its implementation. This occurred when protesters marched on January 22, 1972 to Magilligan Point to show their opposition to internment Then after the Provisionals shot dead two Royal Irish Constabulary (RUC) police officers, the first in the growing conflict, the Brish Army tried to prevent a similar march from reaching Derry's Guildhall Square a week later by employing the First Parachute Regiment to help "scoop up" the troublemakers.

All hell broke loose on January 30th when a crowd of 10,000 protesters started marching on the City Centre, and a group of troublemakers broke off from the main group as it neared it to confront the barricading soliders. At the same time, straggers started engaging the Paras who had taken up position on the high wall behind the William Street Presbyterian Church. Then shots were exchanged, six in all, one apparently by the Offical IRA, and the other by the British Army, hitting two persons who they falsely claimed to be nail-bombers, and only one of whom was involved in the IRA in the march. Then the military forces behind the barricades, assisted by the Paras, executed a pincer movement against the rioters who were confronting them. In the ensuing mele, a youth was killed in the courtyard of the Rossville Flats."The other tweleve victims of 'Bloody Sunday' died elsewhere." (2) Again, it was a question of who had fired first, if at all on the marchers' side, and how many rounds.

The tragedy was investigated by Lord Widgery, the Lord Chief Justice of England, and he rushed to judgment in no uncertain terms on the side of the forces, merely compounding what was seen by almost all as a outright victory for the Provisionals, as direct rule on London soon followed.

The only trouble was that the IRA, instead of sitting on their laurels and waiting for the British chickens to come home to roost, went on the offensive, culminating in their own Bloody Friday which turned the tables back in Britain's favor. The Offical IRA set off a bomb on February 22nd at the Paras' headquarters in Aldershot, killing five cleaning ladies, an Army chaplain, and a gardener.(3) Then there was a bombing in Derry, and a killing of a young Royal Irish Ranger which caused such blowback against the Officials that they were obliged to call a ceasefire. While the Provisionals were soon obliged to follow suit because of similar mistakes, the whole situation changed for them when they caused Bloody Friday on July 21st - setting of twenty car bombs in Befast, killing nine people and injuring 130.

Instead of the Provos, and the Brits for that matter, admitting their mistakes, and seriously chaning their ways, they just refined them, focusing them more on military targets, and trying to reduce the collateral damage. The battle, consequently, waxed and waned for both sides. The British had the upper hand most of the time, and only losing it when they overplayed their military advantage. This was most obvious during the SAS operations all over the province in the late 1970s after its introduction into South Armagh, Operation 'RANC' against selected targets by Secretary of State Humphrey Atkins' Army after the assassination of Airey Neave,and the cull of Provisionals after the Olof Palme assassination failed to trigger a non-nuclear conculsion to the Cold War at the Soviets' and Gaddafi's expense. About suich shoot-to-kill operations, Father Raymond Murray grimly concluded in The SAS in Ireland that there was no UK solution to the Troubles since the military was on a war footing, and given a license to kill.(4)

Surprisingly, this prediction did not prove to be true, showing once again that even the best informed experts are little better than laymen in predicting the future. Murray's failure was compounded by the fact that he had relied upon the most involved, dedicated politician in making it, the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. At the Brighton Conservative Party Congress in 1988, the town where she had almost been assassinated just four years earlier, and after the SAS had shot dead those three Provo volunteers at Gibraltar, she declared: "We shall never give up the search for more effective means of defeating the IRA. If the IRA think that they can weary or frighten us, they have made a terrible miscalculation. People sometimes say that it is wrong to use the word 'never' in politics. I disagree. Some things are of such fundamental importance that no other word is appropriate. So I say once again today that this Government will never surrender to the IRA. Never." (5)

Margaret Thatcher proved to be her own political gravedigger in making Murray wrong, and she herself right. It all started when the Prime Minister went beserk when Captain Simon Hayward' biography, Under Fire: My Own Story, appeared. Hayward, apparently Olof Palme's assassin who had subsequently been set-up on a drug-smuggling charge in Sweden to conveniently get him out of the way for the still unsolved crime, had written most bitterly about how the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence personnel had dealt with his problems there, and now Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe had allowed it all to be made public - what could only arouse questions about what else was going on.(6) Seemingly out of the blue, the Prime Minister sacked the Foreign Secretary and the Secretary of Defence George Younger had resigned in protest over Howe's treatment.

While this profound shake-up was never explained, only crudely covered up by her underlings, and in her autobiography, it had long-term consequences upon her tenure as Prime Minister. Howe, demoted to Leader of the House of Commons, a completely useless post, was most bitter about his treatment, waiting for a chance to get even. The loss of Younger was even more important since he had handled Thatcher's re-election the last time she was up for party leader. Without Younger, there was no one willing to mobilize support for her, and in a growing political vacuum, she isolated herself even more as her closest adviser on Northern Ireland, Ian Gow, was assassinated in July 1990 in a way which most recalled Airey Neave's murder.(7) It seemed hardly deserved after the British had allowed the IRA's last flying column attack on its Derryard outpost to escape without loss after it had killed two soldiers of the King's Own Scottish Bordereres.

The attack was the long-delayed 'tet' offensive, designed to spark an uprising in the North to join the Republic - what had long been delayed by the capture of the Eksund, loaded wíth Libyan weapons for the Provos. Since the SAS culls of their volunteers, culiminating with the one on The Rock, the Brits had had to play it cool because they overdid it, losing their prime source in the PIRA Council, aka "Steak Knife", in the process. He helped organize the booby trap which killed six British soldiers in Lisburn in June 1988, and the Semtex improvised explovie device which killed another eight along the Ballygawley-Omagh Road two months later.

Peter Brooke had taken over as the Northern Ireland Secretary of State by then, and stunned the public on November 1st that if the IRA stopped their violent activities, the Government might well be obliged to negotiate a settlement with it.(8) This was taken by the Provos as a sign of weakness by the British, so they carried out an attack on the mainland, killing 11 Royal Marine bandsmen at Deal, Kent in following September.

The attack on Derryard, near Rosslea, on December 13th proved how wrong they were. The surprise attack by about 20 volunteers from Fermanagh in the Republic was heavily armed with a flamethrower, and two heavy 12.7mm DShK machine guns mounted on armored vehicles. Others with armed with 11 AK-47s and grenades. No sonner had the attack started, Moloney has written, than "...the column itself came under attack. Heavy gunfire was directed at its members from fields about fifty yards away, while a British army Wessex helicopter appeared from nowhere over a nearby hill. the column fled, leaving behind the primed van bomb." (9)

It was the greatest humiliation that the Provos ever suffered during the Troubles, and this once it could not be blamed on any tout, especially 'Steak knife", tipping off the Brits as he had participated in the attack. The British had learned of it by military eavesdropping in Ulster on their preparations. Its 'Vengeful' system of computers checked on the movement of vehicles concerned while the 'Crucible' one followed the movements of its personnel.(10)

The fallout from the fiasco was so damning that the Provos were obliged most reluctantly to declare a three-day-ceasefire over Christmas - what the media chose to see as a response of Brooke's offer. (11) This revived peace talks which had been dormant for a decade. Only this time, it was "Steak Knife" himself who was dealing with the leading MI5 official John Deverell in Derry rather than MI6's Michael Oatley under now the excuse that the PM was still not interested in talking to the Provos because it would be seen as an obvious U-turn by the *Iron Lady'.

Then a ruse had to be invented to get her out of the way, and make her subordinates do the dealing. Thiis was kicked off by the former Foreign Secretary Howe
challenging her style of leaderhp in his famous resignation speech in the Commons on November 13th. This was seen as opening the door for Michael Heseltine, her arch enemy, replacing her - what seemed to be happening when his challenge for the party leadership resulted in a second ballot on the issue. She chose to see it as failing a vote of confiden, and resigned, to everyone's surprise, as PM. She even tried to stay on without its support, but her colleagues would not hear of such an unprecedented effort. Perhaps, it was just a ruse to show how committed she was against any dealings with the Provisionals.

With the 'Iron Lady' out of the way, steps to arrange a settlement gathered pace. The most imporant one was to hand over the computers systems to the RUC's Special Branch so that it could stop violent incidents while bringing their perpetrators to account rather than just allowing the covert operators do another ambush or cull. The leader of the new approach was Detective Chief Inspector Ian Phoenix.

He was the last policeman one would expect to get the position - having served nine years in the Parachute Regiment, and well acquainted with its former Commaning Officer Peter Chiswell who in 1982 became Commander, Land Forces, Northern Ireland. Perhaps that was the whole idea bejind his appointment. Despite his career during which he had become a Lance Corporal, he had grown tired of struggles, and was most desirous of achieving a peaceful settlement in the province - what led his colleagues in the SAS on more than one occasion to wonder why they were there then. Phoenix even devised an SAS airborne response to another Derryard assault, one which called for the use of no less than eight helicopters.(12) He even suggested the mounting of Tannoys on them, and the playing of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" if their use had ever become necessary

The ensuing struggle between peacemakers and warmakers in Northern Ireland has been more complicated then than anyone imagined, especially from the British side. While the Provos were slowly brought along, thanks to the convenient imprisonment of '"Steak knife" apparently aka Padraig Wilson so that he would not be assaasinated by his more aggressive colleagues, and could bring imprisoned ones along with the peace process, the British were confronted by keeping it officially going by having still a government in Westminster which would endorse it, stopping the infigfhting by warmakers on the mainland and in the province from continuing their disputes, getting counter insurgency elements in Northern Ireland and on the mainland to go along with a single agenda, and forgetting about complaints all concerned had about changing what they had long been involved in. In all this, despite appearances, Phoenix's RUC Special Branch group, involved in reducing political terrorism to just another form of domestic crime, was most central to the process.

Unfortunately, it got off to a most counter productive start after Private Lee Clegg, along with fellow soldiers, of the 3rd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment gunned down Martin Peake and Karen Reilly as they sped past a check point in West Belfast on September 30, 1990. The couple from Fermanagh, along with passenger Markiewicz Gorman, were on a joy ride after having stolen a car but the security forces suspected them of being Provo terrorists. Unwisely, the soldiers involved made out that the stolen car had hit Clegg in the process - what was completely demolished when BBC Panorama reporter John Ware discovered that a "... cardboard cut-out dummy of the Astra, decorated with bullet holes, fixed to the wall of the 32 Para's canteen near Belfast...The caption, on the wall above the dummy...said "VAUXHALL ASTRA: BUILT BY ROBOTS. DRIVEN BY JOY-RIDERS.. STOPPED BY 'A' COMPANY." (13)

The biggest trouble was not only were joy-riders made out to be terrorists, but also Karen Reilly was no Provo volunteer but the adopted daughter, it seems, of RUC policeman, and colleague of Phoenix's, John Reilly whose wife Diane who had been married to James McGrillen when she had Karen.(14) McGrillen, an IRA volunteer, had been shot dead similarly in 1976 for car theft. While the killing of Peake and Karen Reilly had just been a result of the Paras going after alleged Provo terrorists, the Reillys saw it as the result of Pheonix's Special Branch going slow on stopping real terrorism, goading the ´Paras to do more. Despite the fact that Ian and Susan Phoenix tried to band with the Reillys over the tragedy, making out that it was simply an accident, and even Ian attending her funeral despite orders against it (15), the Reíllys would not have any of it. Phoenix, it seems, had made a mortal enemy which norhing could undo.

On an institutional level, matters were just as bad in the province and on the mainland because MI5 aka the BOX thought that the RUC was not doing enough to stop Provo terrorism when it was actually doing more despite appearances. MI5 officials were completely turned off when they discovered while on a vist to the province, Phoenix and his agents having a champagne briefing in the morning during which 18 bottles were consummed for an SAS colleague who was leaving (16). Still, the unit, soon upgraded, was providing 80% of the intelligence which was stopping terrorist attacks. The biggest bone of contention between the BOX and Phoenix's unit was over who was directing the ASUs in Britain which were causing most of the havoc.MI5 believed that it was Sean McNulty in North Shields, and Phoenix's SB unit thought it was Phelim Hamill of Queen's Univeristy.

The biggest asset Phoenix had in stopping IRA killing was Martin McGartland aka 'Carol'.(17) McGartland began informing on the activities of 'H' whose ASU specialized in booby-trapping cars. Thanks to his leads, Ian's people prevented a Ulster Defence Regiment soldier from being blown up in North Down, prevented the blowing up of a policeman and a shopping center on November 1, 1990, and then it almost caught 'H' red handed with his bomb making factory.In all, McGartland was credited with having saved 50 people from death at the hands of the Provos.Ultimately, 'Carol' was captured by the Provos' Civil Administration Team aka the torturers, and only escaped death by jumping out of a windon when they were panicked by a helicopter passing overhead. With his cover blown, McGartland was forced to flee to Britain where he was given a new life as Martin Ashe in Whitley Bay, and £100,000, apparently by MI5.

While the SB unit proved ultimately to be right on the matter, leading to the closing down of Hamill's ASU in England, MI5 took over control from the Mets' Special Branch in May 1992 in stopping Provo operations on the mainland.To gain similar control in Northern Ireland, MI5 wanted to have more direct access to its intelligence - what Phoenix complained to its boss about, and he completely agreed, though it didn't stop. The matter came to a head when the top-secret intelligence conference took place in June 1993 near the Mull of Kintyre at the Machrihanish Air Base in Scotland. "Box claimed that it was not happy," Phoenix recorded bitterly in his diary, "with the Special Branch's 'passage of intelligence' and 'would willingly put some of their people in support of us. Kind of them',"(18) In the spring of 1994, Phoenix discovered that MI5 was carrying out operations which the RUC knew nothing about - what became Standard Operating Procedure after he was no longer there to stop it.(19)

Ian continued his fight against the Security Service by socialing more with the province's secuirty people, and increasing the unit's ability to gather intelligence about intended violence through electronic and human sources. On the day before he went to the 1994 top-secret security conference in Fort George, he even got
£2,000 for a handler to recruit a new Provo source.(20) Then Ian asked an alleged trusted colleague, apparently Reilly, if he could borrow his best Barbour jacket for the trip as he planned to do some hiking between conference meetings. Ian then met him over coffee, and "they briefly discussed the PIRA peace moves and how they might be pushed forward."(21) Then he went home at 2 PM to have lunch, and pack for the 5:45 PM from RAF Aldergrove, only to have the Reilly call again. "Have a good weekend. See you Monday." (22) It seemed a bit contrived, like someone wanting an alibi while being involved in some unknown covert action.

"In an interview hours before the crash, the Head of Special Branch (Bob Fitzsimmons) had told Sunday Times journalist Liam Clarke that Adams was trying to end the violence: 'However, he questioned Adams's ability to do so, and believed that a final decision to stop the killing would not be taken until security forces had weakened the terrorist structure.' " (23) Seems that Fitzsimmons' confidence was based upon the security establishment in Northern Ireland having resumed contact with McGartland, and he was on the ground at the Mull of Kintyre to be picked up so that he could be taken to the conference. He would tell it that the Provos were on the ropes, thanks to what he and Phoenix's people had done - what would be a great embarrassment and set-back to the BOX.

When the Chinook was loaded at Aldergrove, there were 25 secuirty officers on board - ten from the RUC, nine from military intelligence, and six from MI5 - plus a crew of four to fly the machine. After it had been airborne for 13 minutes, its passenger list was put through the shredder for secuirty reasons to help hide what was really going on.(24) Just before impact, the pilots changed the way point (WP) to the one at Corran, removing their immediate postion at the Mull of Kintyre from disclosure(25) The flight was then obliged to use a Covert Personnel Locator System (CPLS) where persons on the ground with a portable handset steered the helicopter in for the landing by a UHF radio signal which is received onboard. The only trouble was that it wasn't the landing pad they wanted but a "vertical corner" which forced it into crashing into the Mull's Hill of Stone, killing twenty nine people whose bodies were found on the ground.(26)

The person they planned to pick up, apparently Martin McGartland, witnessed the crash and was horrified by it. Instead of the conference being obliged to work on closely with the RUC, especially its SB, it just acknowledged that MI5 ran everything now because there was really no one else. The source who McGartland wanted to develop, whoever it was, didn't need to be told that the Provos best hopes in a settlement had been greatly reduced by the crash. Little wonder that three months later, after everyone had been consulted on the mainland and back in Ulster, those in prison and those not, the Provos announced their long-awaited ceasefire. Under the circumstances, Prime Minister John Major, who had taken over for Howe when Maggie sacked himl, was quite subdued about the situation, doubting that it would hold up, but it did.

Conditions got worse for MCGartland when a board of inquiry reported without pointing the finger at the pilots, only to have two senior RAF officers add just that. The inquest could not come up with any answer either for the crash.

When the sabotaging of the Chinook seemed well and truly buried, MI5's Director General at the time was allowed the unprecedented liberty of publishing her intelligence memoirs, Open Secret, and, of course, she nothing of substance about it, only that she was most upset about the deaths of the RUC officers, especially that of Bob Firzsimmons, the head of its SB. The names of her own staff lost, particularly that of DCI John Deverell, was never mentioned.

Then Annie Machon, with help from David Shayler, added complete fiction about the confrontation in Spies, Lies & Whistleblowers where the RUC was hardly mentioned at all, and its Special Branch and Ian Phoenix never. The struggle with the Provisionals was seen as all a mainland matter, and its slowness in dealing with the challenge timely and properly. The only time Northern Ireland was mentioned in any serious regard was when collague William Perkins - name changed on orders of Mi5, and apparently Jonathan 'Bob' Evans who is its Director General - was obliged to go to the province just before the crash, apparently to make the necessary arrangement. There can be no doubt that Perkins is Evans after she wrote this: "He looked much older than his age, 38, as he was almost totally bald on top and had a Zapata moustache, which also dated him."(27)

The best example of the cover up occurred when Perkins was sent off to Northern Ireland on this note by his head of section: "And what ca we say about Bill? He has had to suffer the double misfortune of being posted to Northern Ireland wihtout his wife and of having broken his right wrist." (28)

The best evidence of McGartland being the man to be picked up is how the Provos have gone after him, once he became known to the public in the Northeast when the NOrthumbria police caught him speeding, and discovered who he really is. Provos almost killed him for it in 1999, shooting him six times. By this time, he had written about 'Carol's exploits against them, Fifty Dead Men Walking, which was recently made into a successful film, though McGartland didn't like it.

He did go out of his way to say that the pilots of the Chinook must be cleared, and when judge Lord Philip did just this last July, he was ecstatic on facebook: "True Heroes Place Themselves at Risk for the Benefit od Others, to save lies. Many of those who died were leading anti-terrorism experts who had made such a valuable contribution to defeating terrorism in Northern Ireland and on the UK mainland." (29)

Only time will tell if those who sabotaged the Chinook are finally brought to justice.

THE THATCHER & PROVO EXCREMENT FILES

In the beautiful picture above, are images of Margaret Thatcher, Denis Donaldson, Gerry Kelly, Freddie Sacappattici, Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams, the reason is covered in excrement is explained below. This is what was the bulk of what was left, in the leadership of Brit Sinn Fein, after Ruairi O'Bradaigh, along with ethical  republicans left, to form Republican Sinn Fein. Now as every Irish person knows, you will not find a more truthful race of people, on the face of this earth, other than the Irish. Of course when dealing with perfidious Albion, and particularly it's politicians, the Irish do employ an occassional bit of blarney, because the reason God did not allow the sun to set on their British Empire, was because, he simply couldn't trust them in the dark. Now before I go any further, I wish to male it clear, that the author is not aligned to any political organization, in the interest of journalistic objectivity.

After Thatcher made these comments, she was taken aside by an aide and told that 70% of English people, had Irish ancestry from centuries of Irish emigration. However many experts believe, that Thatcher's prejudice towards the Irish, was coloured by her dealings with the leadership of Brit Sinn Fein. Of course the Brighton bomb, didn't help matters either, as she was just relieving herself on the toilet seat, when it exploded beside her and covered her in excrement, from head to toe. This has been a closely guarded secret for many years, but recent revelations. along with what she was doing with Jimmy Saville over their Christmas holidays together, have revealed a treasure trove of information, which we may return to at a later date. She did not trust her own intelligence services, to deal with the Adam's groupies, after the assassination of her close friend Airey Neave, she had her own handpicked, services, to deal with the Irish troubles. Below are two articles that explain matters further. One an older one from The New Statesman, the other from todays Guardian Newspaper, based on newly declassified government documents. If you like the articles I would appreciate you sharing, particularly in Irish Facebook groups, as they have temporarily managed, to have these articles censored there.  

Why did Margaret Thatcher have a jaundiced view of the Irish? Brit Sinn Fein?

Did Margaret Thatcher have a problem with the Irish? It seems a fair question after Peter Mandelson’s odd revelation the other day about meeting her after he had just been appointed Northern Ireland Secretary in 1999:

She came up to me and she said ‘I've got one thing to say to you, my boy’. She said, ‘you can't trust the Irish they're all liars’, she said, ‘liars, and that's what you have to remember so just don't forget it.’

With that she waltzed off and that was my only personal exposure to her he added.

This vignette is of a piece with what we know to be her attitude to Northern Ireland and Irish affairs more broadly; mistrustful, simplistic and, well, a wee bit bigoted.

In 2001 it came to light that Thatcher had suggested to a senior diplomat who was negotiating with the Irish government over the landmark Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985 that Catholics living in Northern Ireland could be moved to live in southern Ireland instead. She made the suggestion to Sir David Goodall during a late night conversation at Chequers. He explained:

She said, if the northern [Catholic] population want to be in the south, well why don't they move over there? After all, there was a big movement of population in Ireland, wasn't there?

Nobody could think what it was. So finally I said, are you talking about Cromwell, prime minister? She said, that's right, Cromwell.

Cromwell’s policy of ‘To Hell or to Connaught’, forced Catholics to the less fertile lands on Ireland’s western-most province, forfeiting the land in the north and central parts of the country at the point of a sword in what we would now recognise as ethnic cleansing. Cromwell was also, in modern parlance, a war criminal too; butchering thousands of men, women and children as his forces cut a bloody swathe across the country.

To this quite glaring historical faux pas can be added the substance of what Thatcher did in office in relation to Northern Ireland. The "dirty war" which raged throughout the 1980s culminated in the notorious murder of solicitor Pat Finucane in 1989, killed by loyalists in his own home in front of his wife and children with the connivance of elements of the security services.

The Pat Finucane Centre for Human Rights and Social Change this weekrepublished a handwritten note  from Thatcher in 1979, found in the National Archive, which shows her mixing up the terrorist Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) with the Ulster Defence Regiment (then the largest infantry regiment in the British Army) – inadvertently praising the former’s "valiant work."

Meanwhile, her intransigence during the 1981 hunger strikes, when ten republican prisoners starved to death in a dispute over their political status, may have shown what her admirers regard as her iron resolve in refusing to accede to their demands, but she effectively granted them all a short time afterwards.

In the current edition of Prospect magazine, the Independent’sesteemed Ireland correspondent David McKitterick offers a more generous assessment, arguing that Thatcher paved the way for the peace process by signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which gave the southern government a consultative role in the affairs of the north for the first time, to the chagrin of unionists. However, given Thatcher’s own strident unionism, this is something of a back-handed compliment, as she herself later regretted signing it.

So what shaped Thatcher’s jaundiced view of Irish affairs? Was it merely the loss of her close colleagues Airey Neave and Ian Gow in republican bombings and her own near miss at the hands of the IRA in Brighton in 1984? Or is it simply that a Grantham girl remembered Cromwell fondly, (perhaps because his first successful battle of the English Civil War was to capture the town from Crown forces?)

Or was she merely echoing Churchill’s equally exasperated view of the Irish: "They refuse to be English."

Margaret Thatcher’s intransigence in Irish talks revealed in archive files

PM argued that giving Dublin an official role in the running of Northern Ireland would plunge it into civil war

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• The Guardian, Saturday 27 December 2014

Garret FitzGerald and Margaret Thatcher in 1985. Photograph: Peter Kemp/AP

Redrawing Northern Ireland’s border would be a fatal mistake, former Irish premier Garret FitzGerald privately warned the then British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, newly declassified government files reveal.

During robust exchanges at a critical summit in the runup to the Anglo-Irish Agreement, Thatcher argued that giving Dublin an official role in the running of the region would plunge it into civil war.

Venting her fears that the north of Ireland was heading towards a Marxist state, Thatcher told her Irish counterpart in the November 1984 talks that resolving the crisis could mean “simply” moving the border. “She wondered if a possible answer to the problem might not simply be a redrawing of boundaries,” records an official note of the top-level meeting, which has only just been declassified under the 30-year-rule.

But Taoiseach FitzGerald rejected the apparent offer.

“What we have achieved at present is a lowering of expectations,” he said. The pair later discussed a federal, Belgium-style model. FitzGerald said the Irish government had worked on dampening hopes among some for an end to Northern Ireland as it was constituted.

Most people had accepted “unity was not on” in the short term.

The secret files, just released in Dublin’s National Archives, include an official note of the two-hour Chequers summit, which reveals Thatcher’s “incomprehension” as to what exactly Irish nationalists wanted.

FitzGerald, leader of the Fine Gael party, explained that the minority felt Irish and part of the majority of the island of Ireland “from which they had been cut off by an arbitrary act”.

The British had drawn a line around the six counties, creating a Protestant majority, cutting off the minority from the nation, and people were “set against each other within a narrow space”, he said.

FitzGerald added there was hard evidence of bias in the justice, security and policing systems in Northern Ireland while the guns of the British Army’s Ulster Defence Regiment were being used to “bully” Catholics.

He warned Thatcher that she needed to deal with the alienation of northern nationalists.

FitzGerald pressed Thatcher for a new system of governing Northern Ireland, based on agreed policies between Britain’s secretary of state and an Irish government minister. Where they could not agree, decisions would be appealed to the prime minister and the taoiseach, he said.

But Thatcher “reacted strongly” to the plan, according to the Dublin government files. “No, no – that is joint authority. You are giving them 40% of our country.”

Thatcher said Catholics in Northern Ireland, who made up 40% of the population, argued that they owed no allegiance to London, “but they took the government’s money”.

They thought they were different to any other minority and were “drawing on resources which the republic did not provide,” she told FitzGerald. “The nationalists feel that all they have to do is to wait.”

She accepted there were problems with Catholics getting jobs and admitted some areas – pointing to Lisburn as an example – “would not accept Catholics”.

During their exchanges, described by those at the meeting as rapid and vigorous, Thatcher fretted about the wider consequences of addressing Catholic alienation in relation to ethnic minorities in Britain.

She said: “If these things were done, the next question would be what comes next? Were the Sikhs in Southall to be allowed to fly their own flag?”

Southall is a west London suburb with a large Asian community which was the scene of a notorious race riot just three years earlier.

FitzGerald said there had been agreement on an Irish government role in running the region, adding that he could not ask the nation to give up its territorial claim over Northern Ireland without such a deal.

But Thatcher insisted: “It smacks too much of joint authority. That was definitely out.”

She added: “The unionists would say you are giving up your constitutional claims but you are coming across the border and don’t really need the claim. That would put us well on the way to civil war.”

Her Northern Ireland secretary, Douglas Hurd, could “no longer manage”, and she would not “fetter his judgment in that way”, she said, urging the taoiseach to “please understand that”.

During one sharp exchange, as she argued that Westminster was answerable for Northern Ireland, FitzGerald retorted that “for 50 years they had not regarded themselves as being answerable.

“They had never permitted a question on Northern Ireland to be discussed in the house,” he said. “That was partly the reason for the present trouble.”

On a suggestion from the taoiseach of a Belgium-style solution – a federal arrangement under a monarchy – Thatcher said she “had not ruled it out, even though it would be attacked by unionists as an effective repartition”.

She added: “History shows that the Irish, whether the Scottish-Irish or the Irish-Irish, don’t like to move. However, they all seem to be terribly happy to move to Britain.”

Thatcher complained there was too much public-sector employment in the north of Ireland, there was no wealth creation and that it was costing London £2bn a year in subventions at the time.

During the two-hour meeting at her country house retreat, Chequers, Thatcher said there were worries about a threat of more violence as a result of the Anglo-Irish talks.

“There was a real danger that a Marxist society could develop,” she added.

Later that day, in a press conference, Thatcher gave her infamous “out, out, out” declaration, when she rejected three options put forward from the Irish for a solution to Northern Ireland – Irish unity, a two-state federation or joint authority.

It was later reported that FitzGerald thought her behaviour was gratuitously offensive.

BURIED STORIES OF PRISON PLANET NEWRY

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.” ― Mark Twain The army asked me to make bombs for the IRA, told me I had the Prime Minister's blessing ... then tried to kill me Neil Mackay Exclusive: confessions of a secret agent turned terrorist KEVIN Fulton is very clear about where the orders were coming from. 'I was told that this was sanctioned right at the top,' he says, sipping a Pepsi in the bar of a Glasgow hotel. 'I was told 'there'll be no medals for this, and no recognition, but this goes the whole way to the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister knows what you are doing.' This was 1980, and if Margaret Thatcher knew about the activities of military intelligence agents such as Fulton, then she was also aware her own military officers were planning to infiltrate British soldiers as 'moles' into the IRA. These moles were ordered by their handlers to carry out terrorist crimes in order to keep their cover within the Provos so they could feed information on other leading republicans back to security forces. For almost two years the Sunday Herald has been investigating the activities of the FRU -- the Force Research Unit, an ultra-secret wing of British military intelligence. Fulton worked for the FRU for much of his career as an IRA mole. This unit, which has been under investigation by Scotland Yard commissioner Sir John Stevens for more than a decade, was involved in the murder of civilians in Northern Ireland. Nicholas Benwell, a detective sergeant formerly attached to the Stevens Inquiry, says the Scotland Yard team came to one conclusion: that military intelligence was colluding with terrorists to help them kill so-called 'legitimate targets' such as active republicans. FRU handlers passed documents and photographs to their agents operating within paramilitary groups detailing targets' movements and the whereabouts of their homes. Pictures were also handed over to help gunmen identify their victims. But there was a problem. The targeting was far from professional and many of the victims of these government-backed hit squads were innocent civilians. In 1989 the FRU passed information to the UDA which the loyalist gang used to murder the Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane, who was shot dead in front of his wife and children. Last week, Prime Minister Tony Blair pledged that the Government was determined to uncover the truth about Finucane's murder. The Canadian judge Peter Cory who was called in by the government to investigate the case is expected to recommend a public inquiry. The Irish government is also pressing for an inquiry of its own. So who was the overall controller of the FRU with its 'licence to kill' republicans? Until now it seemed that responsibility for the activities of the FRU rested on the shoulders of one man -- Brigadier Gordon Kerr, the Scottish officer who led the unit and is now the British military attach? to Beijing. A two-part BBC Panorama programme, concluding tonight, much of it based on the Sunday Herald's previous investigations, puts Kerr squarely in the frame. But if Fulton's claims are correct, then Kerr, soon to be questioned by the Stevens team, was just one link in a chain of command which went all the way to the cabinet and the Prime Minister. As Fulton says: 'Kerr was just following orders. Soldiers don't make up the rules, they just do as they're told.' Fulton's story begins in 1979. He was 19, and had just enlisted in the First Battalion Royal Irish Rangers. Kevin Fulton isn't his real name, but a pseudonym used to protect his identity since turning whistle-blower on the activities of the British military, the RUC and the security services in Ulster's 'dirty war'. His work for military intelligence has been confirmed by FRU sources. Fulton's military file quickly found its way onto the desks of the Intelligence Corps, the regiment which includes the FRU. It made interesting reading. Here was a Catholic from Newry, in the heart of a republican strong-hold, who seemed a loyal servant of the Crown. After only a few weeks in the army, Fulton's staff sergeant approached him. 'I was told that some guys from military intelligence wanted to speak to me,' Fulton says. 'They asked me if I'd like to work for them and I said 'no' as I wanted to remain in uniform. They told me to think about the offer. They added that I shouldn't tell anyone about the visit and that if I was asked I should say they were from a military welfare group. The next time we met they asked me if I'd go to Newry with them. We looked through pictures of local characters and I put names to faces, saying if they had a republican background or not.' The two FRU officers, one of whom was Scottish, continued to try and persuade him to work with them. 'They confessed they needed guys like me -- Catholics from that part of Northern Ireland -- in order to get inside the Provos,' he says. Fulton was still unsure, so the FRU asked him if he could help recruit a Catholic civilian in Newry who might be willing to go inside the IRA. He did. It was an old friend, who he refers to as Agent Washington. He and Fulton accompanied FRU members to the army training camp at Ballykinlar in County Down. 'He was given weapons training. They taught him how to fire an M16, AK-47s, Remington wingmaster shotguns, Sterling sub-machine guns and a Browning 9mm,' says Fulton. 'Remember that this was a civilian going inside the IRA.' Fulton finally decided he'd work with military intelligence. In 1981, he was officially given a compassionate discharge from his regiment on the fictitious grounds that his father was seriously ill. He also received papers claiming he'd been thrown out for republican sympathies -- a great document to present to the IRA men he would soon befriend. From then until 1995, Fulton remained on full army pay as he worked his way through the ranks of the IRA. He began drinking in republican bars in Dundalk and socialising with senior IRA officers, including Patrick Joseph Blair, who the Sunday Herald named this year as one of the men behind the Omagh bombing. Blair later went on to became Fulton's 'mentor'. Not long after his discharge, he told one prominent IRA man that he wanted to join the organisation. He was taken to a room above a bar and confronted by a number of men in balaclavas. 'I'd told them that I'd been kicked out of the army and they started shouting at me saying 'So you're telling us you'd shoot your f***ing comrades if you saw them in Crossmaglen?' I said 'Yes, of course'. 'They started calling me a tout (republican slang for an informer) and saying they were going to shoot me. Eventually, they dragged me outside. They told me to kneel and say the Act of Contrition. I heard a huge bang behind me. It was them banging a big bit of wood on the ground to pretend to be a gunshot. They were testing me. They told me to come back when I was ready. 'My handlers thought this was great. I offered my services to the IRA saying I'd help carry out robberies to fund them. This was all with the knowledge of my handlers in the FRU. I made pals with a prominent Sinn Fein councillor in Newry who suggested I hijack a lorry carrying TVs. I knew that this would give me credibility, so that's what I did. I took a lorry in Belfast with about £100,000 of TVs inside.' Fulton was later arrested for the robbery and served a year in the Crumlin Road prison in Belfast. Because of his republican connections he was denied the usual privileges of an ODC -- an ordinary decent criminal. This also gave him additional credibility with the IRA. Fulton was released in 1986 and inducted straight into the IRA. 'My handlers told me to do anything to win their confidence. That's what I did. My brief was that if I got into a situation where I couldn't get to my handlers but I had to break the law, I was to try not to take a life. I was to shoot high or blow up a bomb prematurely. But that isn't always possible. If I f***ed up all the time, then the IRA would shoot me. Don't forget I also ran the risk of getting shot by the army and the police. I mixed explosive and I helped develop new types of bombs. I moved weapons. If you ask me, 'Did I kill anyone?' then I will say 'no'. But if you ask me if the materials I handled killed anyone, then I will have to say that some of the things I helped develop did kill. 'I reiterate, my handlers knew everything I did. I was never told not to do something that was discussed. How can you pretend to be a terrorist and not act like one? You can't. You've got to do what they do. The people I was with were hard-hitters. They did a lot of murders. If I couldn't be any good to them, then I was no use to the army either. I had to do what the man standing next to me did.' This took an especially dark turn when Fulton became a member of the IRA's 'internal security squad' -- also know as the 'torture unit' -- which interrogated and executed suspected informers. 'I remember once when a guy had been questioned for three days in a safe-house in the Republic,' says Fulton. 'They eventually rolled out a sheet of plastic and decided we were going to 'nut' him. We drew straws to decide on who would do the shooting. Luckily, I didn't draw the short straw.' In 1992, Fulton told his handlers -- this time in both the FRU and MI5, that his IRA mentor Blair was planning to use a horizontally-fired mortar for an attack on the police. His handlers did nothing. Within days, Blair fired the device at an armoured RUC Land Rover in Newry, in the process killing policewoman Colleen McMurray. Another RUC officer lost both his legs. Fulton then travelled to the US and helped develop light-sensitive bombs, activated by photographic flashes, to overcome the problem of IRA remote-control devices having their detonation signal jammed by army radio units. 'I broke the law seven days a week and my handlers knew that. They knew that I was making bombs and giving them to other members of the IRA and they did nothing about it. If everything I touched turned to shit then I would have been dead. The idea was that the only way to beat the enemy was to penetrate the enemy and be the enemy. At the time I'd no problem with this way of thinking.' The claim that the cabinet and Thatcher knew of these types of operations is startling. Thatcher's office has refused to comment on Fulton's claims. It is known, though, that intelligence supplied by other British army moles inside the republican movement was being read at cabinet level. One such mole, Willie Carlin, was flown out of Northern Ireland in Thatcher's Prime Ministerial jet in 1985 after his cover was blown. As chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, which met weekly at Number 10, Thatcher was kept informed of FRU activities. Whether this ran to the day-to-day details of agent-handling is not known. Thatcher did grant the FRU extra funding to recruit agents in the wake of the IRA's Remembrance Day bombing in Enniskillen. Fulton split with both the IRA and military intelligence in the mid-1990s after a number of terrorist operations went disastrously wrong. Once his handlers told him to get a mobile phone and a car for a planned hit in 1994 on a senior RUC officer in Belfast. The IRA team was arrested on its way to carry out the murder. Fulton believes his handlers thought he had outlived his usefulness and deliberately linked him to the operation before tipping off the police about the plan. By then, the army had secured a far more highly-placed mole within the IRA -- a man still active and codenamed Stakeknife. Fulton is sure that he was compromised, so the IRA would kill him and believe they were free of informers, allowing Stakeknife to pass top-grade information to the military without risk of being detected. 'If I was dead that would have been the end of it,' he says. 'There would have been no embarrassment to the army.' From 1995 until now Fulton has been fighting the MoD -- demanding they clear his criminal record, give him a new identity, a relocation package and provide a military pension. 'If they hadn't screwed me, then I wouldn't be screwing them now,' he says. 'If the IRA ever find me I'm dead. I accept I'm a marked man, but I intend to take everyone down with me who was in on this -- no matter how high up the stink goes.'

MUSIC FOR PENSIVE VVANKERS

THEPENSIVEQUILL

Censor Offender

 TAGGED UNDER: DRUGS , GUEST WRITER

Fuck It, I Quit

 Thursday, October 02, 2014    7 Comments

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Guest writer, the Parisian domiciled Frankie McKillen with his views on the drugs issue.

TPQ's Belfast Rockabilly Frankie McKIllen

Fuck it, I quit.

Charlo Greene famously said those words live on KTVA after she reported on a segment about pot to concentrate on legalizing marijuana in Alaska. What she said before dramatically quitting her job was ...

Everything you've heard is why I, the actual owner of the Alaska Cannabis Club, will be dedicating all of my energy toward fighting for freedom and fairness, which begins with legalizing marijuana here in Alaska. And as for this job, well, not that I have a choice but, fuck it, I quit.

Earlier this year Professor Nutt gave a lecture in the Isle of Man called The truth about drugs. In October 2009 he was the Labour Governments chief medical adviser and was sacked from his job because he wrote paper and claimed that alcohol and tobacco were more harmful than many illegal drugs, including LSD, ecstasy and cannabis. In the paper he argued that some top scientific journals had published "horrific examples" of poor quality research on the alleged harm caused by some illicit drugs, Nutt called for a new way of classifying the harm caused by both legal and illegal drugs. Part of what he said in his report was ...

Alcohol ranks as the fifth most harmful drug after heroin, cocaine, barbiturates and methadone. Tobacco is ranked ninth. Cannabis, LSD and ecstasy, while harmful, are ranked lower at 11, 14 and 18 respectively.

 Richard Garside, director for Centre for Crime & Justice Studies had this to say about Nutt's report ...

Professor Nutt's briefing gives us an insight into what drugs policy might look like if it was based on the research evidence, rather than political posturing and moralistic positioning. The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies is a strong advocate of research evidence informing policy making and it is delighted to be publishing this very timely and important contribution by one of the country's top drugs experts.

I personally smoke pot openly, I've never hidden the fact. I'm at a total loss as to why in certain countries it's illegal. It is only a 'gate-way' drug because it's illegal. It doesn't lead people to harder, more harmful drugs. That is one of the biggest myths.

The Truth About Heroin - UK documentary is an eye opener. It is a bit long but worth a watch. And listen to experts not government spin doctors.

Durham chief constable Mike Barton claimed the war on drugs had failed and decriminalisation was the best way to wrestle power away from criminal gangs. "Not all crime gangs raise income through selling drugs, but most of them do in my experience. "

So offering an alternative route of supply to users cuts off the gang's income stream. If an addict were able to access drugs via the NHS or some similar organisation, then they would not have to go out and buy illegal drugs.

 "Drugs should be controlled. They should not, of course, be freely available. I think addiction to anything - drugs, alcohol, gambling, etc - is not a good thing, but outright prohibition hands revenue streams to villains."

What doesn't work is prohibition and the war against drugs is as phoney as the war against terrorism. What is needed is a proper debate with fact not fiction.

Now I'm going for a spliff ... but I'll never smoke weed with Willie again.